Almost immediately, someone’s shaking his shoulder. Lifting his head, he realizes at some point he has slumped forward over the book.
“Sambo,” Rick whispers, “quiet time’s over. Time to run and play and clear the old cobwebs out of our headie-weddies. And wipe that drool off that book. It’s gross.”
Brushing his sleeve over his mouth, Sam blinks and thrusts his neck out of his shoulders like a turtle. The face of the library clock comes into focus and he bolts to his feet with a screech of chair legs. Rounding the table, he slams a hipbone into the corner and yelps. The librarian frowns at him and Rick laughs out loud.
Down the corridor and on the stairs, Rick keeps ragging Sam. “Flaking out in the library, that’s one of the seven deadly signals of excessive weenie-wringing, Sambo.”
“You’re the expert,” Sam responds, “you tell me.”
Jerking a fist suggestively, Rick chortles.
Coach is at the locker room door. Raising his wrist, he points at his watch, and spreads the fingers of one hand to indicate they are already five minutes late. Every minute costs a lap around the gym.
Muttering shit, Rick slams to his locker.
“Styles,” Coach says, “I want to see you.”
However late Coach makes him, Sam will still have to do the laps. It’s Coach’s favorite technique for minimizing backtalk.
“I get calls from scouts,” Coach begins. “Asking about you, about Woods. I tell ya, Sam, I can’t wait to tell’m my boys are playing the girls’ team. Monday, I had a winning team and now I’m asking myself how long I’m gonna have a team at all. I dunno what happened. On Monday, you fell into the girls’ bench and on Tuesday you’re playing monkey bars on the girls’ bus and that bald witch with the tattoos is hanging her bare hiney out the winda and this morning the two a ya got my boys taking practice with the girls. Sam, goddamn it, are you on the girls’ team or the boys’? I mean, I’m starting to smell Vietnam here. Has it crossed what passes for your mind that you might be destroying your team to save the girls?”
With one eye on the clock and a mounting debt of laps, Sam follows the argument as far as Vietnam and then glazes over in confusion.
Coach snaps his fingers in front of Sam’s face. “Pay attention to me, Sammy. I don’t give a crap whether the girls win the state lottery or the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes or a state hand-job championship. I’m warning you, if this bullshit has even the smallest negative effect on my team, your team, the one with the dicks, I’m gonna make your life so miserable, you’ll wish you didn’t have one.”
A life or a dick? Sam wonders but with fifteen laps waiting, he only has one thing to say. “Yessir.”
“Just so we got it straight.”
Rick has already completed his laps and is warming up with the rest of the team. Jogging the perimeter of the court on his lonesome, Sam has ample opportunity to observe his teammates. He sees no sign that team spirit has been affected by thrashing the girls. If anything, the mood is cocky.
Having had the early practice slot, some of them are threading back into the gym from their locker room to settle in the bleachers. The Mutant saunters to the corner of the bleachers. She has scarved her head like a gypsy in a tie-dyed rag with a fringe that looks like it might once have been a doily in some old tabby’s musty parlor. She postures hipshot, legs spread, in the arrogant stance of a movie streetwalker.
Passing her, he offers a high five.
Without hesitation, she slaps his palms with a shout of “Come on, people.”
The girls in the bleachers come to their feet to applaud and echo the call. The boys on the floor respond in kind.
Sam’s euphoria is short-lived. Coach proceeds to find fault with everything he does. The rest of the team falls into a wary silence. Coach holds them all in the locker room for a pep talk about the next day’s home game. He bears down heavily, with repeated digs about playing what he calls, with spit-spraying contempt, a buncha pussies.
It’s as dark outside as it was when Sam woke, reminding him wearily it is still the same day. It’s as if the elastic of time, stretched in the library sunbeam, just got snapped back to its normal form. The rollercoaster track of the day is on a dead flat. He finds himself at a rare, disconcerting loose end, with too little time to bother returning to the Ridge but not enough to do anything constructive beyond a minor errand at the pharmacy before meeting the folks at the Chinese restaurant.
Filling Pearl’s list, he moves slowly down the aisles. At the makeup counter, Billie Figueroa and the M & M’s spritz each other from sample bottles of stinkum, and giggle, with a sound like a string of birds suddenly exploding from their perch on a wire. A little cloud of cloying scent drifts his way and he suppresses a sneeze. Tim Kasten and Pete Fosse are studying the covers of the shrink-wrapped slick stroke books from the top rank of the magazine rack. The bell over the door jangles and Sam catches a glimpse of the Mutant’s headscarf before it disappears between the aisles.
When he arrives at the cash register, the fussy little cashier with her glasses on a tether frowns over a bottle of baby lotion that has two conflicting price stickers on it. She draws an exasperated breath and turns away to fumble at her intercom mike. Behind her, packs of cigarettes are ranked within easy reach. As the cashier asks tremulously for a price check, someone jostles Sam from behind. Reflexively he flattens a hand on the counter and manages to tumble the little heap of his goods onto it.
